Rachel Cusk Measures Truth For A Set Of Narrative Clothes
If someone were to ask me what disaster this was that had befallen my life, I might ask if they wanted the story or the truth. I might say, by way of...
Olga Tokarczuk Diagnoses Testosterone Autism
It was hard to have a conversation with Oddball. He was a man of very few words, and as it was impossible to talk, one had to keep silent. It's hard...
Mary-Kay Wilmers Finds The Relationship Between Suffering And Humility Oh Perhaps There Isn't
It was one of the many ironies of the end of the Cold War that if you were in your own eyes a ‘generous’ Westerner, you imagined that anyone coming to...
Elif Batuman Exemplifies The Precision Of Old Uzbek
Persian, Dilorom told me, had only one word for crying, whereas Old Uzbek had one hundred. Old Uzbek had words for wanting to cry and not being able...
Elizabeth Bowen's Essentially Cruel Young Man
The shallow curve of the bay held a shingly murmur that was just not silence and imperceptibly ended where silence was. There was no wind, just a sensation...
John Berger Reflects On The Experience Of Time
If we knew how long a night or a day was to a child, we might understand a great deal more about childhood. Could it not be that the deeply formative...
Kathryn Schulz Quotes Harville Hendrix On The Classic Love Error
- …somehow, our understanding of love has changed almost not at all. Across the ages from Plato’s day to our own, up and down the cultural registers...
Céline and Turgenev's sentiments overlap, a century apart
Why is it that even when we are enjoying music, for instance, or a beautiful evening, or a conversation in agreeable company, it all seems no more than...
Susan Sontag on Emil Cioran
The human mind possesses now, almost as second nature, a perspective on its own achievements that fatally undermines their value and their claim to truth.
Ben Lerner's Character Once Erred
I searched the internet for short quotes from Ortega y Gasset, who I had at one time thought was two people, like Deleuze and Guattari, Calvin and Hobbes.
David Bowie, Lou Reed And Iggy Pop Keep The Ice Unbroken
The first time I met Lou was probably 1973 when I met for the first time both Lou Reed and Iggy Pop at Max's Kansas City. It was my second or third trip...
David Bowie Discovers The Irrelevance Of Identity
I went to see the Velvet Underground when I first got to the States back in '70. At the end of the show I went back, we sat down and we talked for about...
Schopenhauer On Boredom's Harsh Message
Boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence. For if life, in the desire for which our essence and existence consists, possessed...
James Kelman On The Philosophical Naivety Of The Present Tense
I wanted the central character active in a present adventure, not recounting the one about a mysterious stranger he once chanced to meet aboard a cargo...
Decca Aitkenhead Encounters Amy Winehouse In A State Of Extreme Fame
'Leave her alone, you dirty scum! Why don't you just leave her alone?' As two paparazzi scramble on to the pavement to catch Amy Winehouse emerging from...
From: Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights (4)
Alex’s vanity was, like that of the dubious Casanova at the falsifying moment of composition, trapped in the belief that he had a special power, or perhaps...
From: Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights (3)
With the hesitant intellectual years fly by like a day; life is shortened by the yellowing incompletes. The ‘book' - a plaguing growth that does not...
From Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights (2)
All the retired people labored and labored for perfection. Additions, new wings, roofs sliced off, stairways turned around, bedrooms on the first floor,...
From: Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights
I often think about bachelors. A life of pure decision, of thoughtful calculations, every inclination honoured. They go about on their own, nicely accompanied...
From: V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men
They talk of the light of the tropics and southern Spain. But there is no light like that of the temperate zone. It was a light which gave solidity to...
From: George Eliot, Middlemarch
…Lydgate…was at present too ill acquainted with disaster to enter into the pathos of a lot where everything is below the level of tragedy except the...
From: Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
‘Good. Coffee is good for you. It’s the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave. You know what’s...
From: Elif Batuman, The Possessed
The greatest Old Uzbek didactic writer was the twelfth-century poet Adib Akhmad Yugnakiy. Yugnakiy, who suffered from congenital blindness, demonstrated...
From: Dana Spiotta, Eat The Document
- He began to explain his temporary move back to suburbia, the saga of the failed offspring back at Mom and Stepdad’s. He mock-shuddered as he said the...
From: Alice Munro, Chaddeleys and Flemings
- Work would be what filled their lives, not conversation; work would be what gave their days shape. I know that now. Drawing the milk down through the...
From: Robert Bolaño, 2666
- One day they had to leave the village. According to her parents they had no choice because the war was coming. Lotte thought that if the war was coming...
Readings